Communism always means too much power in the hands of too few people. Always.

Cathy Young just published a sterling rebuttal to an all-too-recent apology for communism, the ideology responsible for the brutal murders of over 100 million people. Please read her article in today’s Real Clear Politics. You can also read the breathtakingly mindless — or soulless — article to which she responds, which appeared last week in Salon.com. The latter is a bit less mind-numbing to read once you’ve digested Young’s excellent essay.

When I was studying the realities of communism, especially the crimes of Stalin, I concluded that cruelty and terror are inevitable under that system. Not just probable or possible. Inevitable. Built-in. It leads to the kind of barbarism that’s probably impossible to grasp even if you’ve lived in it.

As with all totalitarian systems, communism relies on driving people apart by isolating and atomizing them so that they are not able to trust their neighbors or even their family. It relies on a spiral of silence — the fear of speaking truth. Just ponder this observation by Pascal Fontaine who wrote about Cuba in the Black Book of Communism: “The surveillance and denunciation system is so rigorous that family intimacy is almost nonexistent.”

The communist system absolutely requires the centralization of power. And since personal relationships get in the way of that power, the State meddles ceaselessly, sowing distrust and ill will, often through enforced scarcity of goods and services,. Think of it as misery with little if any hope for company.

And since the people most driven to raw power are also the most ruthless, in a system without checks and balances power usually ends up concentrated into the hands of one strongman. Terror is a given because it’s just too much power in the hands of too few people who are invested in perpetuating their power. Even passive resistance is viewed as a threat.

One can only wonder why there has been a revisiting of communism in recent times. Why the apologies? Is it ignorance? Or is it something else? Is there a drive for power, a sense of investment in that system that makes it attractive to some? I’ll explore those questions in future posts.

In the meantime, please visit the Global Museum of Communism, a project of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. It’s an amazing interactive website that helps us to never forget the those who died and suffered so much under communist regimes.